I’ve been following this case for months. If you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a recap:
1. Brandon Vandenburg and the victim were dating. They had spent the evening at a bar – also known as going on a date.
2. Vandenburg drove the extremely intoxicated (unconscious) woman back to his dorm.
3. The incident began in the dorm hallway and moved into a dorm room.
In opening statements, Thurman said they giggled, shot video and sent text messages while they sexually abused her in an assault that began in a hallway. He described in sometimes explicit language how one former player assaulted her with a water bottle while a teammate egged him on. The prosecutor said one of the players passed out condoms and assaulted her.
Thurman said one of the former players urinated on her and made a racial statement. Three of the ex-players are black and one is white. The victim is white.
4. “The Nashville Police only began investigating the incident when school officials reviewed dorm security footage after a vandalism report and instead saw her being dragged down a hallway.”
5. She (the victim) doesn’t remember anything. In fact, she defended him until she was shown the video evidence.
The woman testified that the last thing she remembered on the night in question was Vandenburg plying her with drinks at a popular Nashville night spot. She awakened, she told jurors, alone in a dorm room in her clothes and not knowing where she was.
“I felt very out of it,” the alleged victim, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience at a school outside of Tennessee, testified. “I didn’t feel like myself. I felt very confused. I felt sick and nauseous. I started to develop a really bad headache and I was also in pain in certain parts of my body.”
Vandenberg would tell her later in the day that she got very drunk and he tended to her, she said.
“He told me that I had gotten sick in his room and he had to clean it up and that it was horrible and that he had to spend all night taking care of me and that it was horrible,” she testified of what Vandenberg told her about what had happened. “I apologized. I was embarrassed.”
She apologized to him. And then she did this:
Detectives asked the woman to get a physical examination, but she initially refused, still not knowing what had happened.
When Vandenberg sent her a text message saying that he was probably going to get kicked off the team, she replied by telling him, “I don’t want anyone to get in trouble because of me.”
“I’ll do everything I can to clear your name,” she said in a text to Vandenberg.
Her main concern at the time, she testified, was protecting him. To this day, she said she has no memory of what happened.
We saw this very thing in the Steubenville rape case – the victim consoled their attacker, said that they didn’t believe their attacker had done anything wrong. Little did they know.
It was after Vandenburg and three other football players were charged with her rape that she would see graphic videos of the alleged attack, she testified. Prosecutors played videos of the alleged attack for jurors that they said were shot from Vandenburg’s cellphone. A Nashville detective testified that police were able to recover the videos from a laptop. […]
Earlier this week, McKenzie testified that Vandenberg was “amped” and coaching players to violate the woman. McKenzie said he did not touch her but took pictures. He also testified that Banks and Batey violated the woman.
There’s also testimony that Vandenberg handed out condoms and covered a security camera. Those acts seem pretty deliberate for a guy saying he was too drunk to instigate rape.
Defense attorneys for the players have said that evidence at the trial will show that Batey and Vandenberg are innocent and were extremely drunk at the time. Batey’s lawyer has said that his client was changed by a culture of binge drinking and sex at Vanderbilt.
Oh my. Their reason for what they did was 1.) they were drunk, and 2.) school’s culture of sexual freedom. Guess “sexual freedom” only applies to these guys. Her freedom obviously didn’t count. And for anyone going along with the “I was too drunk to rape/know what I was doing defense” I have a question for you. If you believe that then would you have sex with your mother or a child because you were drunk? If you believe alcohol makes you do things you’d never, ever do when sober then everything’s on the table, right? If not, why not?
I don’t believe for one second that this behavior is new. We just video tape our rapes/assaults now. We need to speak with our boys about this sort of thing. Unconscious women cannot consent (and if they’d do this to an intoxicated woman, then I wouldn’t be the least surprised if they did it to any incapacitated, injured, mentally impaired, etc. woman). Then again, my bet is that everyone involved in this incident relied on the victim being passed out. It’s what made their night possible – it was… a feature, not a bug.